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International Conference on Digital Libraries (ICDL 2006) will be held from December 5-8, 2006 at India Habitat Center, New Delhi. The theme of the proposed conference is Digital Libraries: Information Management for Global Access and it will focus on creation, adoption, implementation and utilization of digital libraries (DL), e-learning and knowledge society.

Information Commons is an initiative at the University of Sheffield which is defined as:“… more than a library, more than a study space, more than an IT centre; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So the Information Commons deserved a new name for a new concept.”Information Commons seems to me as a new form of libraries in the 21st century. What is more important than the physical form of Information Commons is the valuable concept behind it which is Inquiry-Based Learning. According to their website:“Inquiry-based learning is a strongly student-centred approach that places research at the heart of the student learning experience. Student-led inquiries, including research through case- and problem-based methods as well as more open-ended investigations and projects, are the means of engaging students actively and creatively with the questions and problems of their academic discipline. The skills that students develop will be particularly applicable to their future employme…

ASIS&T annual meeting in 2006 is called ‘Information Realities: Shaping the Digital Future for All’ and will be held in Hilton Austin, Texas from third to eight of November 2006. The full program is available now at this address. My friend, Hamid who is a PhD student at UCL has a joint paper with his supervisor at the conference. Their paper is about information-seeking behaviour of scientists.

Intute is the new version of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), which is a free online service enabling web users to access quality web-based resources. Intute includes the eight hubs of the RDN (SOSIG, EEVL, Humbul, BIOME, Artifact, PSIgate, GeSource, Altis) and the Virtual Training Suite.

We all know what we mean by the virtual world and how it differs with the real world. However, it seems to me that nowadays the virtual world is getting closer to the real world. Perhaps it sounds a little bit bizarre, but sometimes I think where this virtual world is really! For example, since today morning I have been living in the virtual world more than the real world. I checked my email, sent and got messages; I did online banking, checked out my car’s MOT number on the online database and read the news. Like everyone else, I frequently do online shopping, book train ticket, book hotel reservation, pay my gas and electricity bills, top-up my mobile phone and more interestingly I do blogging and now you are reading my posts and all of these things happen in the virtual world, somewhere in the space. Anyway, I just thought the virtual world should not be as virtual as we suppose.

I attended the conference of ‘Is e-Learning an Answer to IPE?’ which I mentioned yesterday. It was interesting in terms of learning about a number of current issues in the explored areas including pedagogic and institutional considerations in the implementation of IPE and e-Learning. Moreover, there were some discussions about other issues such as Community of Practice (CoP), WebCT, ICT, Moodle and so on.

Middleton, Michael and Bruce, Christine and Partridge, Helen and Edwards, Sylvia (2005) Developing a research culture and scholarship plan in information studies. In Proceedings 2nd Seminar on Research Applications in Information and Library Studies, Canberra.

Dr Yazdan Mansourian is a lecturer at Charles Sturt University in Australia. He received his PhD in Information Science from The University of Sheffield (2003 to 2006). The title of his thesis was "Information Visibility on the Web and Conceptions of Success and Failure in Web Searching". Yazdan has a BSc degree in Agricultural Engineering (1991-1995) from Guilan University and an MA degree in LIS from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (1998-2001). During January 2007 to June 2017 he was faculty member at Kharazmi University (Tehran, Iran). From 2011 to 2016 he was Director of the Central Library at Kharazmi University and was also Head of the LIS Department during that time.